Time-Saving

Computers would not be nearly as productive as they are if they didn’t have the copy-and-paste commands available to use. Think about how often you copy and paste text, files, images, and more throughout your day. I do it so often that it seems like my fingers naturally rest on the Control+C keys on my keyboard.

Today I want to focus on tools that extend the functionality of the Windows Clipboard to make it easier to use and allow you to get tasks done much more quickly. Here is the software that I managed to find:

Clippy

Clippy is one of the coolest clipboard utilities that I have to present to you. It lets you perform common operations to any text that is currently located on the clipboard.

There are a ton of different things that you can have Clippy do and you will see it shine in certain situations. This is one of those situations that we would have all liked to have this:

How often have you needed to extract text from your emails, only to find the simple, menial task to take more time than it should? You’ll have many ‘>’ characters appearing at the beginning of lines because your email has been replied to, back and forth, countless number of times. Often, you’ll also need to painstakingly reformat the text to make it appear readable.

Now with Clippy, you’ll be able to remove ‘>’ characters and reformat your text with a single click of a button.

You can add individual “tasks” for Clippy to complete or you can create your own “Clippers.” The Clippers are a group of tasks that you put together so that the program can perform multiple operations on the text with just one click. I like to think of these more like macros.

Ditto

Ditto is a free open-source program that extends the Windows Clipboard to have even more features. The number of configuration options that it has is insane but don’t let those distract you from its primary purpose: copying and pasting!

Here are a few of the great features that Ditto has:

• Search and paste previous copy entries
• Keep multiple computer’s clipboards in sync
• Data is encrypted when sent over the network
• Accessed from tray icon or global hot key
• Select an entry by double click, entering the key or drag drop
• Paste into any window that excepts standard copy/paste entries
• Display a thumbnail of copied images in the list

Auto Copy

When you highlight text in a web browser it is often to copy it so that you can use it somewhere else. There is an extension for Firefox that will actually copy the text to the clipboard anytime that you highlight some text. There really isn’t much more to it than that but you may be surprised at how useful the extension is.

Overview

Those are the clipboard utilities that I currently use or have used in the past. They all have some unique features that can save a bunch of time and hassle if you frequently copy and paste things like I do. If you know of any other great clipboard utilities please let me know because I am always looking for things to improve the standard clipboard’s usefulness.